Computing's too important to be left to men Society Subject areas Publishing and editorial

Karen Spärck Jones is winner of the 2007 BCS Lovelace Medal. BCS managing editor Brian Runciman interviewed her. This interview also appears in the ebook Leaders in Computing. By way of introduction, can you tell us something about your work? In some respects I'm not a central computing person, on the other hand the area I've worked in has become more central and important to computing. I've always worked in what I like to call natural language information processing. That is to say dealing with information in natural language and information that is conveyed by natural language, because that's what we use. I think that what has been happening is that those kind of things that were initially thought of as external applications, rather like accounting packages, are becoming more central and not just because more people are using browsers and search engines, but because the information itself they are working with is becoming much more central to what people do.